Tag Archives: Education

Children are excellent at picking new information however children often find learning survival skills difficult. Even when they do remember what to do to survive, will they remember to use the skill when they need it?
Educating children for wilderness survival needs to be very simple and driven home with a demonstration. Take for example the simple skill of having and wearing a warm hat. Exposure to the elements is something that is very dangerous. It can be fatal to adults and children are even more sensitive.
This may seem like a simple thing, wearing a hat is definitely a simple thing but have you ever tried to keep a hat on a child under ten years old? This is an almost impossible task, except when NOT wearing a hat is too painful like in extreme hot or cold temperatures. Waiting until it is too painful before you put on a hat might be too late in a survival situation.
Here is an experiment you can do with kids to show them the importance of keeping insulated. It is called the Lids On experiment.

What you will need is very simple and you may already have them in your house.
1) Two pots of equal size with lids.
2) Two thermometers. It can be done with one thermometer but it is more dramatic with two. More drama increases the likelihood of them remembering the lesson.
3) Stove with two equal sized burners
4) A timing device, watch, stopwatch, egg timer or a normal clock will all be
sufficient.
5) A measuring cup.

The procedure for the lids on experiment is very simple as well. And there are many possibilities for side lessons some of which I will point out.

1) Measure out the same volume of water and pour it into each pot.
2) Bring both pots to a boil at the same time.
3) Turn off heat source for both pots at the same time.
4) Measure the temperature of the water and note the time.
5) Leave the water to cool on the stove. But leave one pot with it’s lid on and one pot without a lid. You can do the entire experiment again and leave the pots outside and watch the temperature drop faster.
6) Have the kids guess which will cool faster, lid on or lid off?
7) After approximately 10 minutes return and measure the temperature of both pots.

The pot without the lid will be significantly cooler. This is because the lid traps warm air around the top of the boiling water. (Just like a hat does for our heads). The water not protected by the insulating effect of the air is exposed to the elements and heat is actively lost very rapidly. (Just like our body heat when we are improperly protected from the elements).

This experiment can be more than a survival lesson. You can expose children to the safety precautions around the stove/cooking, the physical properties of water (why it boils and at what temperature), how to tell time or read a clock, how to measure volume/temperature and how to ask a scientific question (hypothesis) and test for an answer.
I would only add more information about the experiment if the child or children are really demonstrating that the survival lesson has been learned and internalized. Saying the phrase “lids on” after the experiment has been completed when the child is putting on a hat will help drive the message home. So will playing a Simon Says type game where the commands are Lids On and Lids Off. Lids On instructs that they put on a hat and act warm. Lids Off instructs that they take off the hat and act cold.
The repetition after the experiment will be the best thing you can do to maximize the chances that they will remember to put their lids on when they really need to.

In my series of rebuilding articles, I examine what is necessary to rebuild society after a major disaster after basic survival needs are met. In a large enough disaster there will be a tendency to ignore information that is useless to the immediate survival concerns. In all my reading on the subject I rarely hear people mention that proximity to libraries is ideal. Now a library won’t be necessary when you are starving and cold. But after you have been fed, you are warm and secure; this is the time when improvements can be made. Better farming techniques, better construction methods, better healthcare, this list doesn’t have an end. Everything can be improved, and unless there is someone there to teach you a better way, that leaves self directed learning in the form of reading. I will point out, that learning is easier today then it will be after society collapses. Take advantage now.

To paraphrase John Wyndham; author of Day of The Triffids, We have something that no other group tasked with rebuilding civilisation has ever had. We have to collected written knowledge of the previous civilisation. Think about the implications of that statement, everything mankind has learned so far is written down. All we have to do as individuals and as a society is make a point to save the information. Starting from scratch is something we can avoid. We wont have to relearn everything, just focus on the dissemination of that knowledge to new minds. This is formally referred to as education if you are young and re education if you are older.

I am not an advocate of any particular format of education, as long as the knowledge is passed successfully and accurately. Whether it is more efficient to have formal schools with dedicated teachers or a dispersed network of mentors/apprentices depends largely on specifics. The size of the group, the nature of the skill being taught and the situation all play significant roles. I do see increased emphasis on self directed learning in extended periods of hardship as the negative stimulus from life will create a strong drive to improve the situation. As they say necessity is the mother of invention. Difficult situations inspire ingenious solutions.

I have some thoughts as to what education could look like after a collapse of society. Initially groups will be small, everyone will need to be able to do everything. Everyone will need contribute to the group’s survival, everyone will be busy. Education will out of necessity be the “on the job” training variety. Here let me show you how to start a fire/disinfect water/gather food/build a fence, ok, you got it, now you go do it. In small groups and solo the only other option is self directed learning through trial and error, experimentation and as always reading.

As the group grows in size, there will increasing pressure and opportunity for specialization. Is it better to teach a doctor how to garden? Or let him/her focus on medicine and become a better doctor? Does the group benefit more from having their best hunters hunting? Or having the hunters learn how to do something else? It takes less time and resources if everyone does what they are best at, but becoming too dependent on someone else to do their job can be disastrous in it’s own right. In reality I see a mix of education formats and a mix of specialization with widespread cross training. Ideally, people will specialize in one or two areas and become competent in many others. This will maximize the number of people to do any particular job, and also create strong knowledge base for educating other people and advancing the field. I see a decrease in the emphasis on self directed learning, Mostly because of the way things are today, but I have a feeling it is tied to the fact that if the mother of all invention is necessity the contentment must be the executioner and contentment grows as the basic needs are met.

It is worth pointing out that it is way easier to learn something that other people have previously discovered than to discover or re-discover it for yourself. Take the time before civilization collapses to learn everything you can. It will make any transition easier on you and the people around you. It will also help you today, because knowledge is power and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

In H.G. Wells’ book, The Time Machine, the main character builds a time machine and travels into the future. He finds that the civilization he knows has been destroyed and he finds a preindustrial society has taken its place. Without ruining the book, he returns home and takes three books to the future. He has to decide what knowledge to save and what knowledge he will need. THey never tell what three bookshelf chooses. I have often wondered myself what three books would I take? I cannot however, settle on the top three. This inability to choose led me to conclude that it would be worth saving as many sources of knowledge as is humanly possible. A conclusion reiterated by the remake of The Time Machine (the movie) made in 2000. Instead of three books, an artificial intelligence interface to a compendium of all human knowledge is brought to the future. Now THAT is something you want when trying to rebuild a society. Since that doesn’t exist yet, and I don’t have the ability to bring to Internet with me, that leaves books. I will leave you with the same question indirectly posed by The Time Machine, which three book would you take?